The Mystery and the Power

March 18, 1984
Lakeland

March 1984
Port Charlotte

Sources Of The Living Tradition Part I
The Mystery and the Power

The Living Tradition we share draws from many sources: “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”

My expressions today may seem contradictory to my usual humanistic stance. What I say today may be obscure, insupportable, irrational, or whatever. But beliefs arise, words accrue, because of the impact of the basic experience of living.

These basic experiences are screened through filters, and the filters are different.

In dealing with this affirmation from the living tradition, I suggest that when confronting the mystery and power of the universe, there are religions and there is religion. Beyond the humanistic stance which generally prevails in the way my convictions are formed and interpretations made, I believe a certain resonance echoes within, responding to the source of all life. That resonance pervades all religious cultures, but the expressions differ. The visions of Isaiah were interpreted through his Hebrew culture. The Hindu feels the same power and identifies Brahma-Atman. The Christian may have a vision of Christ or the Virgin Mary. The Polynesian is awed by Mana. The American Indian experiences Manitou, the Great Spirit. The late Arthur Koestler (THE INVISIBLE WRITING, p. 353-4) notes: “Because the experience is inarticulate, has no sensory shape, colour or words, it lends itself to transcription in many forms, including visions of the Cross or of the goddess Kali; they are like dreams of a person born blind, and may assume the intensity of a revelation. Thus a genuine mystic experience may mediate a bona fide conversion to practically any creed, Christianity, Buddhism, or Fire-Worship ... (and he goes on). I also liked to think that the founders of religions, prophets, saints, and seers had at moments been able to read a fragment of the invisible text; after which they had so much padded, dramatised and ornamented it, that they themselves could not longer tell what parts of it were authentic.”

Shelley (Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822) – the poet who was expelled from college because he wrote a paper on the “necessity of atheism,” felt the mystery and power when in his “Adonais” (his tribute to John Keats) he wrote,

“The one remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.”

In our century, E. E. Cummings, too, was reaching for an understanding of the ineffable in the lines,

“I thank You God for most this amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings; and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)”

To me, “ineffable” means undefinable but real, unutterable but authentic, nevertheless. While that which is ineffable does not lend itself to philosophic systems or formal critiques there is a reality which the poets and artists have tried to express. Shelley was reaching for the Ineffable when he wrote of “the One remains, the many change and pass.” Erik Erikson, (quoted by Pryser, p. 113-14) wrote, “Religion elaborated on what we feel to be profoundly true even though it is not demonstrable: it translated into significant words, images, and codes the exceeding darkness which surrounds human existence, and the light which pervades it beyond all doubt and comprehension.”

E. E. Cummings too was reaching for the Ineffable:

“how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?”

But, we do doubt; we rely on the experience filtered through our ways of human culture. Too frequently the filters screen out the power and beauty of all that unimaginable You. In the same way that candid theologians have always found it astonishingly easy to say what God is not and staggeringly difficult to clearly express what God is, so I would have you consider how the human filters distort and transform that quality of total existence the poets call the “One that remains,” or the “unimaginable You.”

There will be some of you who will recognize that I am attempting to elaborate two basic points in my ways of believing. First, that experience precedes interpretation; second, that I respond to Abraham Maslow’s “peak experience.” To quote him, “all mystical or peak experiences are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They should therefore come to agree in principle on teaching that which is common to all.” And again, “Much theology, much verbal religion throughout the world, can be considered the more or less vain effort to put into communicable words and formulas and into symbolic rituals and ceremonies the original mystical experience of the prophets.” (RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES, p. 20/24)

Aldous Huxley was on the same search in THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, writing that, “The divine ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.” (p. 21)

The first observation I would offer is that the human filters of myth, creed, tradition, and dogma screen out the reality of the power of this Ineffable Stream, of this mysterious ultimate reality. But the mythology survives. Human mythologies are never-endingly demonstrated to be myths. By definition, a myth is not true, but points to some abstraction which could be true. But many believers have trusted the myth to be reality rather than representation.

Consider the myth of the Holy Books – the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. The scripture takes written form when scribes or disciples attempt to preserve the spiritual or moral proclamation of the prophet or poet. But the language forms can only be of the time of writing. More basic still, no language is adequate to transmit the profound experience which inspired the religious leader. But the impact of such a person is so powerful that continuing sanctity becomes attached to what is essentially static, the book. There is a self-defeating nature to the process because the greater attachment there is to past interpretations of past experience the less sensitivity there can be to immediate experience. The human filters of one’s immediate experience have more readiness to be open to the peak experience than the human filters of the past where the screen has become silted up by the repetition of many interpretations.

This is true of religious dogmas and creeds, too. Whitehead wrote that “the dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of (human)kind.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 57) When the myth becomes authority rather than illumination, it shadows intellect and deceives emotion.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a relevant example. Many Christian theologians are usually candid in admitting that the doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit – is not a New Testament teaching. There is no solid evidence that the disciples formulated their faith in such abstract theology. Confronted by Hellenistic philosophies and Mediterranean religions of dying-rising savior gods, the growing Church developed the Trinity as a theological explanation of their interpretation of the religious feelings of the earlier founders of the Christian movement.

The more orthodox justify this process of perpetuating interpretations as the best way to preserve and teach religious truth. Christian theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, wrote, “without symbols nothing has intelligibility and form for us.” (THE RESPONSIBLE SELF, p. 157)

But Unitarian Universalists, as well as many others, have moved away from fixed theological formulas and do not accept creeds fixed by tradition or church authority. For one thing, there is inevitably huge inconsistencies in the pat answers or symbols of religion directed by the past. Rudolf Bultmann, the German Biblical scholar, shook up some easy assumptions of the Christian believer when he pointed out that early Christianity was a blend of several strands of history or tradition, and many inconsistencies were simply ignored as the Church grew and assumed authority. “The world is the creation of God, who cares for the birds and decks the grass of the field with its beauty. (Matt. 6 26/30) Yet at the same time it is the realm of Satan, the ‘god of the world’ (II Cor. 4,4), the prince of the world (John 12,31). The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. (I Cor. 10.26) Yet creation is subject to vanity and corruption, yearning for the day of its deliverance.” (PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY, p. 176)

The reasonable mind turns away not only from such inconsistent interpretations, but also notices that the dogma or the symbol tends to become the object of worship rather than the experience the symbol is supposed to represent. Fixed liturgies, formally performed sacraments, safe-journey medals, the ritualistic gesture – all these become magic formulas rather than symbols with meaning. The experience has been filtered out by interpretations.

John Bowen (NY Times Book Review Section 9/4/66) writes about an author who “once described some seagulls in one of his novels. He went to Brittany to check his description by observation and was forced to the decision that since the seagulls he observed were not much like the seagulls he described, his seagulls were more real than the real seagulls.” Myths that filter out facts let in a pious sentimentality that is contradictory to common sense.

Such is the continuing error of those who filter interpretations of new experience through the screen of bygone myth, dogma, or authority. The ancient symbols become more real than one’s own experience. Then the ineffable is blocked from shining through the filters. Meister Eckhart comprehended this in one sentence when he wrote, “He who seeks God under settled form lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it.”

The second observation I would make is that none of us are free from the filters through which experience is interpreted. We may reject religious orthodoxies but nevertheless our experience is filtered through and expressed in some structure of belief and culture.

We live in a particular time, 1984, in the Northern Hemisphere. We also are members of a world going through turbulent social change. What we say and what we do hinges on what our values are, where our self-interests reside and to what degree we feel sufficiently free to transcend some of the ways our cultures and subcultures expect us to say and behave. A person’s vision of him/herself is filtered through the expectations others have – the cultural framework and inter-personal relations.

Consider any international incident – Grenada, El Salvador, Lebanon, Iran/Irak – then observe how differently Havana, Washington, London, Moscow, Paris, and Peking will interpret this event. Sometimes of course there is deliberate deceit or double-talk. But often enough the differences can be accounted for by the varied interpretations which are the filtered products of unlike ideological screens and unidentical basic biases.

I remember being in a forum where a scientist was discussing the explosions of new knowledge which rapidly make textbooks, educational equipment, and methods obsolete or outdated. He commented that scientific knowledge was doubling every two years, and then remarked provocatively, “after a person receives his PhD and leaves the university for professional work, he very soon ought to consider himself a dropout because knowledge in his field will have so rapidly advanced or critically changed.” As knowledge modifies and re-structures method and former achievements, the more up-to-date scientist may be filtering experience through a different screen of assumptions and values than did his predecessor in the university or laboratory.

Alfred North Whitehead phrased the dynamics of such evolution when he wrote, “Progress in truth – truth in science and truth in religion – is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.” (RELIGION IN THE MAKING, p. 127)

Furthermore it is important not to deny or ignore the manner in which our beliefs, attitudes, and acts are filtered through a cultural framework which may differ from the family across town or the nation across the world. Such recognition will not enable us to escape from our filters, but such a recognition may motivate us to know ourselves better and acquire a deeper knowledge of the framework which contains our beliefs and values.

You are all familiar with the kaleidoscope, the viewing device wherein we observe patterns of colored class. We see ever-new patterns by turning the kaleidoscope. A few years back I was introduced to the Taleidoscope, similar to a kaleidoscope, except that at regular intervals in the design end, there are glass lenses which see through the tube to objects beyond it. As one turns the tube looking at a face, for example, we see through the lens shifting views of the face, tattooed by changing colorful designs creating varying distortions.

So with understanding not only our view of others but also our interpretation of experiences. The view is our own, but to recognize that the lenses are fitted into our own culture, and within the culture, individual design will increase our understanding and may strengthen our wish to know ourselves better in order to make reality better.

Does this cultural limitation and circumscribed belief indicate that we cannot be touched by the Ineffable Stream, the “unimaginable You,” the power and the mystery? There are many who would assert that basic reality is unknowable, beyond any possible reach of human understanding. Many would quote Isaiah 40/12,

“To whom then will ye liken God?
Or what likeness will ye compare with him?”

When quoting such ancient Biblical inquiry, one must observe that the word “God” itself is an image, an interpretation of experience, not the experience itself.

No one can provide assurances that stand the tests of reason or consensus. Most persons settle for the security of a creed and take comfort in never brooding about such difficult and tantalizing notions as the Ultimate Power and Mystery.

Yet I believe there is an adventure of the mind and feeling waiting for those who reach for some taste, touch, or hint of that which was before we were; which will be when we are no more. We can reach for the experience of the Creative Source, that Power which can turn matter into energy and energy into matter – that reality is awesome. The words of Christian theology are not illuminating for me, but this should not prevent me from reflecting on an experience that does put me in touch, however remotely, with what is basic and never-ending.

Francis Thompson, the mystic poet, reached:

“O World Invisible, we view thee
O World Intangible, we touch thee.”

A paradox, right? Yet, teasing. Goethe said more prosaically, “the highest cannot be spoken.”

The experience which filters through for me is creativity – creation, re-creation, new forms, rolling waves of oceanic energy.

As an affirmation of belief, I hold that operation of mind and emotion on experience is not reaching for something that is not there. Symbols change. Rituals eventually grow stale, but the ultimate real force of our Universe abides. There is power; there is mystery.

A. L. Lazurus, a poet (Christian Century, 8/24/66) comes through my filter, at least somewhat, in his lines, “Some People”:

“Some people say that god is love;
they mean the pass-making kind, perhaps,
as distinguished from the merely passive.

Some people feel in their bones that god is sin
and worship religiously within that shrine.

Some people get tired of waiting for god
but never do anything about it.

For others, up and giving makes their day
and even reactivates their metabolism.

Faith, hope, and charity, sacred or profane:
All these deserve their innocent divinities.

Some few divine the true theology;
creating is all they know, or need to know;
Someone Out There is also doing it.”

No one is more aware than I am that this talk has been difficult to follow. It is much easier to speak of practical problems, of obvious issues, of the values and political choices before us. Also, it is not difficult to take apart the premises, implications, and conclusions of someone else’s religion.

I have no evidence whatever that reflection on origins and realities we cannot understand will make us better or more effective persons. But even the most pragmatic will concede that the human person is a curious being, wondrously made. We speculate about the force that created us; we wonder whether life is worthwhile, or whether we are more than a complex mixture of accidental life, impersonal evolution, and compulsive culture. Cosmic curiosity is a unique trait of the human family.

Whether or not we ever are touched authentically by the Mystery and the Power, the “Ineffable Stream,” the “unimaginable You,” the secret of creation will not be demonstrable by lab experiment, learned dissertation, devout theology, or sacred ritual.

But if through the filters of our human living, one can still make the daring surmise that beyond us there is a unified force of splendid energy-creating, destroying, changing all that we call life and the world, then perhaps we will say with Auden (lines in praise of W. B. Yeats):

“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”